The purpose of this (very long) post is to update the community on the two proposals done earlier this year to start advertising Dash and the plans for the unused budget. I’ll expand on the execution of the first campaign in the future with more data, but I wanted to publish about the results and remaining funds because that is a timely discussion.
SUMMARY
-The campaign that was planned for Facebook was executed on Google because Facebook banned crypto advertising.
-The results are promising, but it is an expensive path to growth.
-We want to repurpose the funds from the second proposal to pay for other marketing expenses, both within Dash Core Group and in within certain community projects.
0. Why did we want to do advertising?
Advertising is a polemic topic. Some people believe it is the solution to every problem, and some people believe that it has never solved any problem. The truth is somewhere in the middle. It is a huge industry because it works well for certain things. But it doesn’t for others, and many companies waste huge amounts of money on it.
We wanted to start doing some controlled advertising testing because we wanted to assess how well it would work for Dash at our current stage of growth. Also, it would allow us to test things we can’t test in another way because we don’t have direct data on our users.
1. What was the plan?
Crypto in general and Dash, in particular, are at a very early stage in their adoption cycle. For that reason, we decided to focus on improving awareness as the primary goal of the campaign. There are many different versions of the user funnel in marketing, but they all start with awareness. Users must first acknowledge your existence and begin to identify that the product is one they should consider. Once you have achieved that, you can move deeper into that funnel to consideration, conversion or repetition.
Awareness is achieved by putting forward key messages in front of your audience. It is not necessary for the audience to act on it, but the impact stays in their mind and slowly builds up. You can do this on many platforms and using a variety of formats. The user is able to learn about our brand without leaving the content they’re currently consuming.
Measuring awareness is complicated, but platforms like Facebook and Google offer tools to at least get an approximation. Facebook polls the audience before and after the campaign. Google only polls after, but they leave a part of the audience unexposed to the campaign so they can use it as a control group. They also give some insight on consideration, which is a nice bonus to have.
We didn’t previously have data on what aspects of Dash are more interesting to our potential audience, so we built many different ads and videos to test which performed best.
Besides improving awareness, we defined a secondary target of further informing interested users. We assumed a certain audience would already be aware of Dash and show interest, or they would progress quickly to that stage. For them, we built a series of landing pages they would see if they clicked through the ads. Those pages had more information, and let the user progress to dash.org if interested. Using different landing pages for each unique ad gave us the ability to frame our messaging around each ad’s targeted language. This allows us to increase click through rate and optimize the conversion of landing page clicks to dash.org clicks. It also allows us to compare performance between various messaging and learn what resonates with potential users for future targeting efforts.
The first campaign was initially prepared to be executed in Facebook. The audience for the campaign was defined around several crypto related criteria. We didn’t want to make it too narrow (you don’t want to preach to the choir), but neither too broad and show ads to people who don’t even think about money.
We chose to run the campaign in three countries: UK, Spain, and Venezuela. Venezuela was chosen because earlier this year we were already starting to see signs of the adoption that is happening now and we wanted to have data from a distressed country. Spain and the UK were chosen because we also wanted to test more mature or stable markets, they had the right size to control costs, and language to avoid dealing with translators (the Ogilvy team that was running the campaign is based in Madrid and had Spanish, Portuguese and English speaking personnel).
SUMMARY
-The campaign that was planned for Facebook was executed on Google because Facebook banned crypto advertising.
-The results are promising, but it is an expensive path to growth.
-We want to repurpose the funds from the second proposal to pay for other marketing expenses, both within Dash Core Group and in within certain community projects.
0. Why did we want to do advertising?
Advertising is a polemic topic. Some people believe it is the solution to every problem, and some people believe that it has never solved any problem. The truth is somewhere in the middle. It is a huge industry because it works well for certain things. But it doesn’t for others, and many companies waste huge amounts of money on it.
We wanted to start doing some controlled advertising testing because we wanted to assess how well it would work for Dash at our current stage of growth. Also, it would allow us to test things we can’t test in another way because we don’t have direct data on our users.
1. What was the plan?
Crypto in general and Dash, in particular, are at a very early stage in their adoption cycle. For that reason, we decided to focus on improving awareness as the primary goal of the campaign. There are many different versions of the user funnel in marketing, but they all start with awareness. Users must first acknowledge your existence and begin to identify that the product is one they should consider. Once you have achieved that, you can move deeper into that funnel to consideration, conversion or repetition.
Awareness is achieved by putting forward key messages in front of your audience. It is not necessary for the audience to act on it, but the impact stays in their mind and slowly builds up. You can do this on many platforms and using a variety of formats. The user is able to learn about our brand without leaving the content they’re currently consuming.
Measuring awareness is complicated, but platforms like Facebook and Google offer tools to at least get an approximation. Facebook polls the audience before and after the campaign. Google only polls after, but they leave a part of the audience unexposed to the campaign so they can use it as a control group. They also give some insight on consideration, which is a nice bonus to have.
We didn’t previously have data on what aspects of Dash are more interesting to our potential audience, so we built many different ads and videos to test which performed best.
Besides improving awareness, we defined a secondary target of further informing interested users. We assumed a certain audience would already be aware of Dash and show interest, or they would progress quickly to that stage. For them, we built a series of landing pages they would see if they clicked through the ads. Those pages had more information, and let the user progress to dash.org if interested. Using different landing pages for each unique ad gave us the ability to frame our messaging around each ad’s targeted language. This allows us to increase click through rate and optimize the conversion of landing page clicks to dash.org clicks. It also allows us to compare performance between various messaging and learn what resonates with potential users for future targeting efforts.
The first campaign was initially prepared to be executed in Facebook. The audience for the campaign was defined around several crypto related criteria. We didn’t want to make it too narrow (you don’t want to preach to the choir), but neither too broad and show ads to people who don’t even think about money.
We chose to run the campaign in three countries: UK, Spain, and Venezuela. Venezuela was chosen because earlier this year we were already starting to see signs of the adoption that is happening now and we wanted to have data from a distressed country. Spain and the UK were chosen because we also wanted to test more mature or stable markets, they had the right size to control costs, and language to avoid dealing with translators (the Ogilvy team that was running the campaign is based in Madrid and had Spanish, Portuguese and English speaking personnel).
